Trump can have one more felony, as a treat
The US military is aggressively non-political. Don’t count on them to do anything as long as the civilian institutions do nothing.
That’s not the point. The Military is no longer a tool he could use. Staying neutral unless things get really bad is a good thing. He’s already tried to use the military against protestors. (And the military told him to pound sand)
Am I crazy? I distinctly remember a military helicopter hovering quite low over protesters in a city and that very much didn’t feel like them telling trump to ‘pound sand’
Yeah, not crazy: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/politics/pentagon-national-guard-helicopter-dc-protests/index.html
I appreciate the army’s attempts at trying to stay neutral but from my perspective they were already complicit in the trump regime and I have no faith that they would be any different if he gets another shot.
You’re not crazy. The thing is there’s a difference between the national guard and the regular army. The national guard is used to control protests all the time by state governors. In D.C. Trump gets to act as that governor. What Trump wanted was a regular army Infantry division with lethal weapons. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs actually got into a shouting match with Trump over the issue.
When he couldn’t have that toy he tried to tell the National Guard to use live ammo without actually ordering it. He told them to use “all available means” to protect federal property. The National Guard however has trained extensively against using live ammo in protests since May 4, 1970. So they used every non-lethal method they knew, including the down wash of their medevac helicopters. Which the Pentagon later said not to do again as they consider that to be against the regulations for medevac helicopters.
Just means they can be deployed against traitors, not that they have the authority, or consider themselves to have the authority, to make the judgement on who is and is not traitorous.
Civilian control of the military is a good thing. But it also means that any thought of the military as a safeguard against any tyranny that worms its way in through civilian institutions is… misguided.
May seem sad, but in fact good if really works this way.
Since I’m in Russia and here shit went wrong (EDIT: after the last time shit went right) since Yeltsin using military to “resolve” a constitutional crisis in 1993 (not really a crisis, just when the Supreme Court says both Yeltsin and his opponents in the parliament should resign and have new parliament and presidential elections, that apparently is a crisis, because he’s the president, thus the boss and should be able to make all decisions ; that unironically was the main argument in support of Yeltsin, ex-Soviet people have a very weird idea of law and order, where the boss deciding something is “dura lex sed lex”, while referring to codified laws is “legal illiteracy”).
